‘MAGA, ICE Is’ | The Drawing Board
In an illustrated op-ed, local artist Joe Boruchow opines on the tactics of ICE, an agency he argues was created to enforce “the MAGA movement’s extremist interpretation of religious law.”
When I put pencil to paper and let my imagination run, I’m often surprised by certain discoveries and associations that emerge. While sketching in the aftermath of Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s recent killings, I began to conjure images of ISIS rolling out over the Levant in 2013.
Not wanting to commit to a ham-fisted metaphor, I put my sketchbook away, only to find the idea too sticky to relinquish. As I embarked on the labor-intensive process of making the paper cutout you see printed here, the parallels became all too clear: the uniforms, the masks, the military armaments, the extremism, the rigid ideology. This is what ICE is.
This MAGA army, paid for by 2025’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” is the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the nation. It is only partly intended to expel and terrify what the regime perceives as undesirable immigrants. It is becoming apparent that it was also created to impose the movement’s fundamentalist values on American society writ large.
That is why Good and Pretti were perceived as such a threat. Good was a liberal woman in a same-sex marriage who wouldn’t bow to ICE tyranny. Pretti was a legally armed citizen determined to protect his neighbors from agents’ overreach and abuse.
Both represent a challenge to the MAGA movement’s extremist interpretation of religious law, embodied by JD Vance’s Catholic integralism and Mike Johnson’s radical evangelicalism.
As the flow of immigrants over the nation’s southern border has abated, Republicans have resurrected their panic over Sharia Law. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas has been campaigning on his fight against “radical Islam,” while his colleagues at the state level have created a “Sharia-Free America Caucus.” This is pure projection. Similar to Islamic extremists, conservative Republicans strive to impose their retrograde worldview on the rest of us.
They have fought to prevent child marriage bans, and in the Heritage Foundation’s newest banger, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” it implores the government to subsidize religious institutions “to preach and affirm God’s design for the human body, sex, marriage and the family.”
It continues: “This includes pastors publicly reinforcing the truth that there are only two sexes — male and female — and that reason and revelation agree that marriage … consists of the exclusive union of one man and one woman and is ordered toward the spouses and the children that can and, if so blessed, should come from that union.”
Although they don’t explicitly say it, I believe Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection under her command, is positioned to be the enforcers of this ideology, using the state’s monopoly of violence against transgressors.
As ICE and CBP expand their operations to other cities and the government builds out its archipelago of concentration camps, I expect we will see more scenes that evoke the violent tactics and aesthetics of fundamentalist extremist groups of the past.
If we are unable to stop this project at the ballot box, and America’s elites continue to roll over to this administration, these antidemocratic forces will continue their race to entrench their power and strip us of the freedoms we take for granted.
MAGA continues to show us what they are: MAGA, ICE is.
If you have an idea for a drawing, editorial cartoon, multipanel comic strip, or other illustration that might serve as a visual op-ed, please email oped@inquirer.com.